Inkling vs. ERNIE 5.1

Inkling is an open-weights multimodal AI model from Thinking Machines built to support customization, agentic workflows, coding, reasoning, vision, audio, and enterprise AI use cases. The model is a Mixture-of-Experts transformer with 975 billion total parameters, 41 billion active parameters, 256 routed experts per MoE layer, and six routed experts active per token. It supports context windows up to 1 million tokens and was pretrained on 45 trillion tokens across text, images, audio, and video. Inkling is designed as a broad foundation model rather than a narrowly optimized benchmark model, giving it balanced capabilities across reasoning, coding, factuality, instruction following, vision, audio, tool use, and safety. Its controllable thinking effort lets developers adjust how much computation and generated reasoning the model uses, helping teams balance quality, latency, and cost for different production needs. The model can run agentic coding tasks, use tools, create web apps, generate polished multi-page artifacts, reason over long contexts, and work through iterative refinement loops. For multimodal tasks, Inkling can process images, answer questions about visual content, transcribe and reason over audio, follow spoken instructions, and combine visual reasoning with code-based tools such as Python. Thinking Machines trained Inkling for calibration, instruction following, factual reliability, refusal behavior, and safety across multiple modalities, including evaluations for dangerous capabilities and human-AI threat vectors. Inkling is available on Tinker for fine-tuning, with 64K and 256K context options, an Inkling Playground for testing, cookbook recipes, and support for multimodal post-training workflows. Its full weights are available on Hugging Face, and deployment support is available through APIs and infrastructure partners such as TogetherAI, Fireworks, Modal, Databricks, Baseten, SGLang, vLLM, llama.cpp, and transformers.

ERNIE 5.1 is Baidu’s advanced large language model platform designed to deliver high-level reasoning, autonomous agent behavior, creative intelligence, and enterprise-scale AI performance while dramatically improving parameter efficiency and training cost optimization. Developed as the next evolution of the ERNIE model family, ERNIE 5.1 inherits the foundational capabilities of ERNIE 5.0 while reducing total parameters and active parameters to create a more efficient and scalable AI system capable of flagship-level intelligence. The model performs strongly across global AI leaderboards and benchmark evaluations for reasoning, world knowledge, mathematical problem solving, search capabilities, and agentic workflows, placing it among the top-performing AI systems internationally. ERNIE 5.1 introduces a disaggregated fully asynchronous reinforcement learning infrastructure that separates training, inference, reward systems, and agent loops to improve scalability, stability, resource utilization, and long-horizon task optimization. The platform also includes FP8 low-precision optimization, elastic resource scheduling, and reinforcement learning consistency improvements that reduce latency and improve overall model efficiency. Baidu developed a multi-stage reinforcement learning training pipeline centered on expert model specialization and on-policy distillation, enabling ERNIE 5.1 to combine capabilities in reasoning, coding, conversational AI, creative writing, and agentic tasks without performance degradation between domains. ERNIE 5.1 demonstrates advanced creative generation capabilities with strong contextual awareness, emotional understanding, narrative pacing, and stylistic adaptability that support storytelling, professional writing, and AI-assisted creative production.